A few years, Microsoft Research developed a method to deblur images captured from a camera. While it was intended for consumer photography, they’re now using it to help improve the image quality in Bing Maps.

Anything to help improve aerial image quality is a good thing, and this appears to make a noticeable difference in the image quality.

Over the weekend, Bing Mapslaunched a new application in partnership with National Geographic called Global Action Atlas. The new application allows people to peer into areas where our planet needs help. The actionable themes include Conservation, Humanitarian Affairs, Cultures, Exploration, Climate Change and Energy. For example, if you click on the Animal and Plants icon in the Pacific NW region, Global Action Atlas will provide an overview of Bird Protection in the Northwest, specifically focused on the spotted owl, and provide a call to action for people wanting to help.

In addition, they’ve just released another nice-sized batch of imagery. It totals 194,000 sq km and covers various locations in New Zealand, Australia, Mexico, Namibia, Russian Federation and South Africa. More about the update can be found here.

Microsoft has just released their largest update ever to Bing Maps, with more than 6.7M sq. kilometers of fresh imagery.

They added a ton of new imagery in the Russian Federation, Australia, Mexico and many places in the United States. They also added a lot of new Bird’s Eye imagery in Sweden. Check out their Bing Maps World Tour to see the highlights.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas recently shared some new Bing Maps features with the audience at TED, and he showed off some amazing stuff. The way that Flickr images (and even video) are incorporated into the StreetSide imagery using PhotoSynth technology was stunning, as was some other features.

Microsoft just released the “Bing” application for iPhone and it is a solid effort. It was voice search that is similar to the Google app, and Maps implementation that is similar to Google Maps on the phone.

It’s a free app, so it’s certainly worth downloading and trying out. Chris Pendleton has a nice writeup of it on the Bing Community blog, where he highlights some the new features on it. Most of the features are similar to the pre-installed Google Maps, but the voice search in Bing Maps is a slick feature that Google Maps doesn’t have. The rest of the features are almost identical to the Google Maps app.

So which should you use? It depends what you do with it. In my case, I typically use it for real-time traffic. I’ll occasionally do a search on it, but usually just want to see which which interstate I should avoid. Below is a side-by-side look at the two apps showing real-time traffic around Atlanta. Google Maps is on the left, Bing on the right:

It’s not even close! Bing has all kinds of shading and blurring, which looks very nice, but makes it a pain to see what the colors are. Is that a yellow, or the road color? Is that orange in there? It’s quite a mess.

Google’s may look more childish, but it’s far easier to see. If I want a quick look at the traffic, I’ve got it.

The Bing app is pretty great, and overall I’m very impressed with it. However, I’ll keep using Google Maps (for now), simply because it does a better job for what I need.

An article over on Screenwerk today seems to think that Microsoft may start powering the engine behind MapQuest, similar to how they power the search results for Yahoo.

It would make a lot of sense. Tons of people still use MapQuest, but the technology is getting rather stale. Putting Bing’s power behind all of those MapQuest eyeballs would be a win for both companies, and it would create a better experience for the end user.

Of course, this is all just speculation at this point, simply because it seems so logical. Do you think it’ll happen?Should it happen?

When Microsoft launched Streetside a few days ago (a direct competitor to Google’s StreetView), I wondered how they could possibly catch up with the huge amount of coverage that Google already has in place. Their answer: Navteq.

Navteq has vehicles on the road all the time, collecting road data (speed limits, bridge heights, etc). Microsoft plans to “strap a few cameras on their vehicles to record some photos”. It certainly seems like a great way to start playing catch-up. I still imagine it’ll be quite a while until they have anywhere close to as much imagery as Google, but this gives them a solid plan to start gaining some ground.

They also revealed that they’ll be doing monthly releases of new Streetside imagery, similar to their monthly aerial/satellite releases. Those releases tend to be rather impressive is their coverage, so we’ll see if their Streetside releases can match that.

Like most of these kinds of battles, the winner will be you. Both companies will work hard to add better features and greater coverage, and we get to reap the benefits. Kinda nice.